Space is so incomprehensibly vast that it is hard to image that the very furthest reaches of what we can see, planets that exists billions of light years away are actually relatively close to us and what lies further than that is where the interesting stuff starts – unexplored space.

This new celestial body has been named ‘Oumuamua’ and was spotted by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii. It is currently traveling at 85,700 miles per hour, so quick that the scientists nearly didn’t spot it.

Meet ‘Oumuamua: a cigar-shaped asteroid the size of a football field.

Astronomers are understandably excited about this new discovery.

“For decades we’ve theorized that such interstellar objects are out there, and now — for the first time — we have direct evidence they exist,” and “This history-making discovery is opening a new window to study formation of solar systems beyond our own.”

Oumuamua has been identified as a “triaxial ellipsoid”, an unusual asteroid as it varies in brightness and spins on its axis every 7.3 hours.

The uniqueness of the discovery excites the imagination to what the possibilities of what is out there in deep space might be.

“This unusually large variation in brightness,” and this“means that the object is highly elongated: about ten times as long as it is wide, with a complex, convoluted shape. We also found that it has a dark red colour, similar to objects in the outer Solar System, and confirmed that it is completely inert, without the faintest hint of dust around it.”